Discussion: Effectively Using a Nonprofit Job Board

Using a nonprofit job board is not as simple as it seems. That seems like a strange thing to say. After all, how hard could it be? All you have to do is read the job description and apply to the job. Well yes, that portion of a job board is not too hard. The real complexities occur when trying to find the jobs that are relevant to you.

All nonprofit job boards have a feature that allows you to search the available jobs in their database. If you do a general search, you will end up seeing every position that is available. Needless to say, this won't help you too much. You will need to use the advanced search options if you want to get the most out of your searches. These options act as filters, allowing you to browse only the jobs that match the criteria you select. In general, these are the types of filters you can expect to see:

• Experience level
• Education level
• Location
• Category (i.e., type of job)
• Salary range

Some sites have more options, but these are the main ones you should be concerned with. Out of all of these, I would say that experience level and category are the most useful ones.  They are very important traits for your job search, so you will want to make sure they are part of the jobs you browse. You could argue that salary is also important, but I always found that pay was fairly consistent based on the level of job. For example, most entry level jobs are going to pay the same. You want to have your search be as narrow as possible, so it's best to use two of these filters at the most. You could probably get away with three, but you don't want to get too overwhelmed with results.

But that's just my advice, I'd be interested to hear what has worked best for you when it comes to using job boards.  Do you have methods that have worked well for you?  Or maybe you find that using different filter than the ones I suggested works better.  I'd love to hear from you, so post your comments below.